Apps for Climate Action contest & data catalogue launched
Here’s an interesting new take on an Apps contest for developers. This one is sponsored by the Province of British Columbia and is being launched in tandem with a climate change data catalogue. The contest is open to residents of Canada, so if you care about climate change and want to show off your skills, check it out.
Imagining Canada Beyond 150
I had the pleasure of attending the 150!Canada Conference, co-hosted by my friends at MASSLBP and IPAC. It was a fantastic event designed to kick off the planning for Canada’s 150th anniversary party in 2017. The first day was packed full with 25 inspiring speakers sharing many different perspectives on the meaning and opportunity of Canada’s 150th.
What I took away was that all of the participants felt that a bottom-up approach enabled by web technology was really necessary to create opportunities for Canadians to tell their own stories of how they came to be Canadian, what it means to them, reflecting on where we’ve been, who we are and where we’re going. I was also struck by the strong desire to reflect the diversity of Canada’s multicultural present while recognizing our aboriginal past.
I think there is a role for the ChangeCamp community in this project, inviting our fellow citizens into conversations to tell those stories and to imagine Canada’s future in creative new ways. What do you think?
For an archive of the liveblog from the full event, see below the jump:
Edmonton Open City Workshop
Thanks to Chris Moore, CIO of the City of Edmonton, for inviting myself, David Eaves and Nick Charney to participate in Edmonton’s Open City Workshop held on Saturday, March 6th at the Art Gallery of Alberta. The discussions were rich, moving beyond open data and mobile apps to deeper questions of the relevance to democracy and community at the local level. This video captures the major content of the day, including our panel discussion on “Government as Platform”.
The open data and open government movements are now truly across Canada. With the major announcements Moore gave at the closing remarks, it is clear that the City of Edmonton is staking a claim for leadership in the emerging municipal open government ecosystem. This includes the ideas of a MuniForge for open source municipal software and a call for a Code for Canada project to mirror Code for America being supported by our friends at Sunlight Foundation in the United States. I’m really amazed at the growing momentum over the past year, and excited to be a part of it.
Ignite Toronto 3: Digerati Throwdown
My ChangeCamp talk at Ignite Toronto 3 is online. My apologies if it’s a bit rough around the edges.
If you’re not familiar with the Ignite format, it is 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, with the slides changing on a timer outside the speaker’s control. It’s hard to keep up to, but a fun and challenging format to distill ideas into intense 5 minute nuggets.
It’s a fun evening of community sharing ideas. I’ve also incorporated the format into full day unconferences as a way to prime the pump of ideas and get the day off to a high energy start.
Open Space, Social Media and Open Data
This video of a talk I gave at the wonderful Reboot conference in Copenhagen in June 2009. I’ve delivered different versions of this talk at a number of venues, and I think it’s the best synthesis of the theory of change that is the foundation of the work of the ChangeCamp project and community. I also think it needs a lot of work, but that’s life.
